For the first of what’s certain to be many times, following a blockbuster offseason of seemingly limitless roster spending, Dodgers players were asked about the same hot-button topic last weekend.
Were they surprised how the rest of the sport recoiled in the face of the team’s freewheeling winter, in which the Dodgers made half a dozen significant signings and blew past every other team’s payroll?
Did they agree with the argument that has emerged in some corners of the industry, that the defending champions’ stop-at-no-cost attitude might be bad for baseball and potentially harmful to the sport’s already fragile scale of competitive balance?
And most of all, did they feel like MLB’s new evil empire — big-money villains with targets on their backs before they’ve even reported for the start of spring training?
Unsurprisingly, the Dodgers saw things differently. And in their first public appearance as a team during Saturday’s DodgersFest fan event, they responded with answers that painted a different picture of what has become the league’s biggest offseason story.
“I don’t look at us as villains,” said starting pitcher Blake Snell, a poster boy for the spending spree after signing a $182-million deal. “I look at us as a team that wants to win. If any other teams or fan bases want to get upset, you know what to do. Follow what the Dodgers do. Because they want to win, and they’re spending money.”
“This is going to be another stripe for the tiger,” veteran shortstop Miguel Rojas echoed. “The Dodgers are always going to be in that hate kind of mode from other teams. We all know that. We all know we are the Dodgers, and we are ready to kind of embrace everything that is coming our way.”
“Who wouldn’t want to be the focus and do what our organization is doing for the city, the fans?” manager Dave Roberts added. “To be quite frank, we draw more than anyone as far as any sports, any venue in the world. So when you’re drawing 4 million fans a year, the way you reciprocate is by investing in players. And that’s what we’ve done.”
Consider these the first of many such quotes that likely will trickle out of the Dodgers clubhouse this season — the start of a narrative arc destined to underline every step of their World Series title defense.
With a luxury-tax payroll pushing $400 million and a litany of former most valuable players, Cy Young Award winners and All-Stars dotting their lineup, the Dodgers have emerged as baseball’s newest big-market antihero. They have raised alarms in a sport with no salary cap and vast disparities in player spending. They have built a team some fear could dominate the sport for the foreseeable future.
“It’s difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that they’re doing,” New York Yankees chairman Hal Steinbrenner insisted to YES Network. “We’ll see if it pays off.”
For now, though, the Dodgers aren’t apologizing for the ways they’ve reloaded. Or how they’ve capitalized upon their status as a superstar destination.
Sure, as first baseman Freddie Freeman put it, “I understand people can be mad at us.”
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But, as teammate Mookie Betts countered, “What are we supposed to do? As a player, of course you want to play with the best players in the world.”
Granted, no Dodger was expecting the team to be this aggressive this winter. They watched in collective amazement as the team added Snell (one of the top starters on the free-agent market), Roki Sasaki (a coveted 23-year-old Japanese phenom), Tanner Scott (the top free-agent reliever available) and several other names to what already was arguably the most talented team in the majors.
“My family and my friends, they all asked, ‘Are the Dodgers crazy?’
“The crazy part is, you think it’s like, OK, once you sign someone, like, that’s it,” Snell said. “Then we sign another guy, and you’re like, that’s it. And then it just keeps going.”
“It’s incredible,” fellow starter Tyler Glasnow concurred. “It’s like the Avengers. It’s like the Monstars. It’s the best team I’ve ever been on.”
None of this, however, promises anything. Even after the Dodgers’ memorable march to the World Series, it could take the team time to get all the new pieces to fit.
“I really don’t think you can take anything from last year and expect it to carry over to the start of the season,” veteran utility man Chris Taylor said. “We have new faces. It’s a new team. It’s gonna be a new identity.”
The crapshoot of a 162-game season and unpredictable playoff format still looms too, especially for a team that frequently faltered in the postseason before finally prevailing last October.
“We all know that [all these moves] aren’t gonna guarantee us the World Series,” Rojas said. “We gotta go out there and do our part.”
What the spending has produced, though, is a renewed source of motivation among players — serving as a potential elixir for any World Series hangover.
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“I mean as a player, all you want is winning, right?” Hernández said. “And when you see the front office giving you the best chance, it just puts you in a better position, and in your mind, as a player, you go on the field and try to give the 200%, just to give it back what the front office is giving us.”
After all, while the Dodgers might not consider themselves villains, they know how high expectations have been set entering another season. Once again it will be World Series or bust. And this time, amid all the other scrutiny this offseason has kicked up, the chance to cement a dynasty hangs in the balance too.
“There’s a buzz around here,” Freeman said. “There was a buzz last year when we got Shohei [Ohtani]. And there’s a major buzz here. That’s a testament to our organization, our fans, our front office and players want to come here.”
“We’re sort of talking about legacy territory,” Roberts added. “So that’s what we’re focused on right now.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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